


Simple

by nanasekei



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 04:11:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11478351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nanasekei/pseuds/nanasekei
Summary: He had to cut through the crap and be direct, but from his experience, that would just result in them yelling at each other again, and spending days without talking again, and – most importantly - Gil’s productivity would go to hell again. He could not let that happen.





	Simple

 

 

He was right.

That was the simple, objective reality. Everyone in the crew knew that, even if they would not dare saying it out loud – or if they, like Suvi, didn’t _want_ to, for fear of hurting their dear pilot’s feelings.

Said pilot was _wrong,_ though. He was stubborn as hell and incredibly annoying about it, but even he couldn’t deny the basic fact: Technology is short-lived, constantly evolving and changing, and there’s no point in clinging to an old-fashioned ship design just because it took a lot of time to make it or because a lot of people had put on a lot of effort in it. By Kallo’s logic, humanity’s technological progress would have stopped at the invention of the wheel.

So Gil was right. He knew it, the crew knew it, and hell, even Kallo knew it, deep down. He’d die before admitting it, but he knew.

That wasn’t really a problem. Gil was a creature of habit, and after some time in the Tempest, he had created a good routine of work, poker, fighting with Kallo, coffee, a peanut butter sandwich, more work, fighting with Kallo again, more coffee, more fighting with Kallo, and so on. He adapted. Having a pilot who seemed set on complaining about your every move in your own ship was just one more thing he’d have to get used to in Andromeda.

However, Kallo didn’t seem to handle their fights as well as Gil did. Every time they yelled at each other over the intercom the salarian seemed more frustrated and upset, and Gil could tell shit was going to hit the fan if things continued to go on like that, but he wasn’t going to back down.

So when Ryder finally stepped in and told both of them to stop fighting and Kallo to just let Gil do his job, it was kind of the end of their bantering routine. Kallo had no choice but to accept the Pathfinder’s orders. And so Gil found himself with all the time and freedom in the world to upgrade the Tempest as he wanted to.

For the first couple of nights, it was great. However, after finishing all of the work that had been delayed by Kallo’s constant opposition, he felt sort of… Empty, in a way. Apparently, not having someone to bounce ideas off definitely changed the rhythm of Gil’s creativity, even if that bouncing consisted mostly of yelling at other. When Kallo and him were still on speaking terms, he spent three nights in a row without sleep in order to reconfigure the entire nav array – sure, because it was not very user-friendly, but also because he really wanted to see just how pissed Kallo could get with him without his head exploding. Now, he had the time to do twice as much work as he got done before, but instead he found himself spending way too much time staring at an empty screen that should’ve been filled with numbers and equations about the ship’s stats, scribbling random schemes without coming up with anything coherent and drinking three times more coffee.

_That_ was a problem. He already drank way too much coffee.

So when he mentioned the topic to Jill in one of their many calls and she rolled her eyes and said “Just talk to him, dude. It’s simple”, he decided to take her advice. He waited until one of Suvi’s breaks to climb up to the bridge, a coffee mug in one of his hands, doing his best to seem like he just stumbled there casually.

“What do you want?” Kallo asked immediately, throwing all his hopes for a non-confrontational talk out of the window. The salarian stared at him with his dark eyes defensively, and Gil felt kind of strangely uncomfortable and guilty, like he was invading his space or something.

“Relax.” He said, already kind of annoyed. It wasn’t his space – hell, it wasn’t _his ship_ , it belonged to everyone in the crew and he was very much a part of it, whether Kallo liked it or not. “I just wanted to-“

“Check out the design of the cockpit to see if there was something else you could change?” Kallo interrupted, his voice full of bitterness. “Perhaps you found a way for the ship to work without it? Should I talk to Suvi and tell her we might have to start looking for new jobs?”  
  
“Whoa, man, calm down! I just want to talk, ok?” Gil said, trying to sound calm even though he was already regretting coming there in the first place.

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Well, I have, though, so why don’t you just…” That was so not going to work, Gil realized, sighing. “Damn, you don’t make it easy, you know? I came here to try to talk to you without fighting, but now I pretty much forgot how I was planning to do that.”

“I… Fine.” Kallo stood up, leaving the ship on autopilot. He was pretty much Gil’s height, skinny like a stick, like all salarians he had met before. He had somewhat of a presence, though, that Gil hadn’t seen in many people yet, from any species. It was like a brattish confidence – not exactly arrogant, but… Intense. It was almost like a person could tell how stubborn Kallo was before meeting him. If Gil didn’t know about his piloting skills, he could have mistaken him for a soldier. “What do you need? I keep my data specs in-“

“No, it’s not that.” He looked down, staring at his mug of coffee as if it was supposed to give him some guidance. _Just talk to him_ , Jill had said, but clearly Kallo was not going to be down for some small talk about the latest antics of Ryder’s pyjak. He had to cut through the crap and be direct, but from his experience, that would just result in them yelling at each other again, and spending days without talking again, and – most importantly - Gil’s productivity would go to hell again. He could not let that happen.

But Kallo was still waiting in front of him – with those _huge_ eyes – and he had to say something, anything, so he settled for just opening his mouth and see whatever would come out.

“I… I wanted to upgrade the security system around the nav core.” That was true – he had spend the past two days trying to come up with a good way to do it, without success. “And I thought… I was wondering how did you guys come up with it.” That was… Not true, and not at all what he expected to say, but from Kallo’s surprised face, it wasn’t a terrible start.

“Oh. Seriously?” He asked, looking at Gil carefully, almost studying his face. Kallo’s eyes made Gil feel kind of exposed, so dark and intense that it felt like they could swallow him. It was weird and uncomfortable and hard to look away. “I mean… It wasn’t very complicated.”

Gil nodded, trying to seem encouraging.

“Ok, uh…. O’Connell came up with the idea, in fact. We had discussed it previously, but he was the first one to actually create a design for it and imagine how to execute it.”

“You always bring up this O’Connell. Who was he?”  
  
“O’Connell?” He smiled a bit, like he had just seen the guy walk through the door. “He was the only human in our team. Called himself a “token”. Incredibly clever, unbelievably uptight. Lucille and Teon often played pranks on him. Sorenna disapproved, but ultimately agreed it was necessary for morale. O’Connell didn’t seem to mind. He complained a lot, but he was never truly upset. He always wore his shirt with the first two buttons open, and there was a coffee stain right bellow his collar.”

Gil just stared at him, blinking in shock, and Kallo seemed to come back to reality. “Oh, I-I’m sorry, I’m rambling.”

“No, no, don’t worry about that!” He finally managed to answer. “He seems like a cool guy. But you mentioned a lot of other names. Lucille and Teon and…”

“Sorenna!” Kallo immediately answered, his voice pitching a bit with excitement. “She was an asari, one of the greatest minds I’ve ever seen at work. She was almost 600, and she used to joke with me to send her a postcard from Andromeda when I got here, because she would probably still be at her lab. She wore her bondmate’s perfum and had face tattoos from her time as a commando – eight purple stripes, two at each corner of her forehead and four at the centre of her chin. She had a huge fight at a bar in one of our breaks one day…”

Gil rested his back against the windows of the bridge, still way too shocked at the salarian’s sudden enthusiasm. That had to be a new record of time he and Kallo had spend talking without fighting. It was perhaps the first time Gil saw him without any tension. Kallo’s face was all flushed as he talked, his already pinkish skin becoming even more reddish with the rush of excitement, and there was a spark on those huge eyes that could light up a whole room.

It was kind of cute.

“She and Teon finally agreed to just never bring up the topic again, but O’Connell claimed he still had vids of it somewhere. Nobody paid him much attention.” He said, finishing a story Gil clearly had missed most part of. He seemed happier than Gil had ever seen him, though, like he had just seen all of his old friends again.

Then it hit Gil – he probably _did_.

“You miss them a lot, don’t you?” He asked without thinking, and as Kallo’s smile faded he immediately regretted those words.

“Not… Exactly, no. It’s a bit strange.” He looked down for a moment, then turned around to the windows. Probably not to look at him, which Gil didn’t blame him for. That was a way too personal topic for two people who had spend most of their time together at each other’s throats. “I can see and hear them so clearly. It’s like seeing you. Or, or Ryder, or anyone. They’re an entire galaxy away, and most likely all dead now, and yet… Some days it’s almost like I forget they’re gone.”

Gil tried to imagine it – he thought about Jill changing her mind at the Initiative’s door at the last second, hugging him goodbye before cryo. He thought about never seeing her again… But it wasn’t really that, was it? He thought about his father and how little or nothing he could remember of him. He imagined remembering it all – his voice, his scent, the colour of his eyes. It had always pained him to not remember anything, but now it seemed like forgetting it made it easier to move forward.

He thought about August Bradley’s motto in Prodromos: “We stay out of people’s grief”. Then he thought about carrying that grief around, in perfect detail, every single second of every single minute of every damn day.

Jill was wrong. That was far from simple.

“It was a really brave thing, you know. Coming here.” He heard himself saying, and Kallo turned his head to look at him.

“Well, thank you, but I suppose you could say the same for all of us”.

“Nah, I didn’t left anything behind.” Gil shrugged, and Kallo scoffed in disbelief. “Seriously! I didn’t even think this through properly, I just figured a new galaxy would be a good idea.”

Kallo smiled, clearly still not buying it. They both stared at the window for a couple moments, and found himself looking at Kallo instead of the view – that spark in his eyes hadn’t gone away, and he felt himself smiling so hard it made the corners of his mouth hurt.

“It _was_ a good idea”, Kallo said, still staring at the window, a smile of his own beginning to form.

“Yeah”, Gil agreed. “It sure was”.


End file.
